Renaissance and Reformations

Designed for both students and general readers, this introduction to Renaissance and Reformation literature offers a description of early modern habits of writing and reading, of publication and stage performance. It considers the ways in which early modern writers constructed the past and designed the present, wrote about people and places, recovered and adapted classical genres, and tackled religious and secular controversies.

All these topics are illustrated with a profusion of excerpts from early modern texts, including works by More, Erasmus, Wyatt, Spenser, Philip and Mary Sidney, Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Campion, Daniel, Donne, Southwell, Dekker, Taylor 'the water-poet', Aemilia Lanyer, Jonson, Chapman, Middleton, Mary Wroth, Ralegh, Greville, Wotton, Herbert and Milton. Throughout, readers are reminded that the consequences of the English reformations were as important as the better known influences of the Renaissance.